In the jungle, the mighty jungle…

The pooker sleeps tonight.

Okay, that should be, ‘in the front room, the tiny front room, the pooker sleeps today’, but then no one would get the reference.

Paul (known nostalgically to his siblings and his mother as ‘Paulie Pooker’ or ‘the pook’, although he gets wroth with me if I call him that in front of his buds) had a night shift last night (11 p.m. to 7 a.m.) so he’s currently crashed in the living room, and I am being quite as meeses here in the back. Just how quiet are meeses is something I can’t be entirely certain of, but at the moment, these meeses aren’t doing anything noisier than typing on a keyboard, so I’d say they’re pretty quiet.

Paul and I have both been battling horrible sore throats, and it occurred to me yesterday that it might be because of these goddam air purifiers we shelled out (well, I shelled out) so much jack for. I’d seemed to have gotten my sore throat somewhat under control by starting to gargle with hydrogen peroxide (it sounded strange to me, but it said right on the bottle you could do it, and it works like a sonofabitch, too) and I shut off my air purifier and I seem to be doing well. Last night I briefly turned the AP back on again without the ionizer engaged to see what would happen, and within 20 minutes, my throat was drying out painfully again, so… I guess these air purifiers should only be engaged when people are actually smoking. Using them constantly, which I'd thought would help with my allergies by pulling particles out of the air, seems to make one appallingly sick. So so much for modern technology, at least, in that regard.

Both Paul and I still have slight sore throats but, assuming no strep bacteria have taken the opportunity to move in and set up housekeeping, I think we’re on the mend.

My allergies gave me hell last night and I had a horrible coughing fit this morning, right before Paul got home, but I seem to have gotten past that finally, too. I need a trip to Wal-mart to pick up some Claritin (and this time, I’m not letting Pat talk me out of it) but for right now I seem to be, if not a hundred percent, then at least fairly functional. After a sleepless night, I finally crashed around 7:30 and slept through until 12:30, and feel pretty good right now.

It didn’t rain much in Zephyrhills yesterday, and amazingly, it hasn’t rained yet today that I’m aware of. Maybe this spring storm cycle has finally broken. Wouldn’t that be nice.

The Road Warrior is an astonishing experience in widescreen DVD format. I’ve been watching an old videotape I bought used from a video store that went out of business over and over again for the last fifteen years or so, and it just astonishes me how much of the film I’ve missed since the three or four times I first watched it on the big screen. (Yes, I’m a big Road Warrior nut.) A great deal has gone unnoticed by me over the years, from minor details like the fact that the mutant driving the jacked up pink Cadillac has also dyed his Mohawk and his sideburns shockingly pink – something we see right before he gets blasted by a flame thrower – to an astonishing amount of Biblical imagery throughout the film… crucifixions abound, and among many many others, the scene where the Gyro Captain brings a wounded, probably dying Max back to the enclave of the Good Guys, flying over an almost surreal battleground held by Humungus’ human vermin, could very much be seen as Christ’s mythical tour through Hell after his death on the cross, while a later scene, where the good guys – the Chosen People? – leave their enclave behind, to immediately have it possessed by the bad guys, only to watch it engulfed in explosive fire from the booby traps they’d left behind, is very reminiscent of Sodom & Gomorrah.

One could, I suppose, sit down and write a really long winded, pompous, and annoying treatise making Max out to be a Messiah-figure and assigning various Old and New Testament roles to the other characters in the film, as well… Papagallo seems very much to be a Moses-type, although I’m not at all sure if Humungus would be Pharoah, Pilate, or just plain Satan. (Given the way he calls Wez ‘his dog of war’ and visibly unchains him at the climax of the film to go after Max, Satan is most likely, with Wez acting as all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Revelations.) However, that would be tiresome. The Road Warrior doesn’t have to be anything more than what it is on the surface… probably the best science fiction/post Apocalypse/action movie ever made.

But in DVD widescreen, oh my GOD! It’s AWESOME!

Paul’s friend Pat just called. I’ve perceived a decided cooling of enthusiasm in Paul over the past week or so towards playing in my campaign again, and Pat doesn’t seem really wild about the idea, either, so I think the World of Empire is pretty much unofficially dead again. It doesn’t bother me much at all; these guys are terrible roleplayers and simply aren’t ready for a campaign that expects them to think about what they’re trying to accomplish, and that doesn’t set out scenarios with vividly painted route markers like any video game – ‘first go here and accomplish this obvious goal, then go here and use the key you got at the first step to open this door, at which point you must defeat this monster and then go here and punch in the special six digit code to open THIS door…’ They’re obviously pretty much baffled and annoyed by a world with a great deal of three dimensional detail where the surrounding non player characters are not immediately discernible as Helpful NPCs or Enemies, and where the goals are not instantly attainable by the shortest possible straight line.

And that’s perfectly okay. It just means they need to keep playing Forgotten Realms stuff and computer games on their TVs, and I need to concentrate my talents on writing, not gaming.

Paul is awake now, and rooting through the boxes of comics in here looking for my run of Avengers Forever. Maddeningly, he can find issues 1-6 and 9-12, but not 7 & 8. That’s the sort of thing that always happens to me when I’m reading someone else’s comics, and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one.

Avengers Forever is a story Paul will love, I’m sure, since I loved it the first two times I read it and I only really sat down and started analyzing the plot the third time I went through it… at which point, the whole thing badly falls apart. But Paul just isn’t analytical, so he’ll adore it, like all the other Kurt Busiek fans do.

Those remotely interested in my analysis of the mini-series can go here and have a good time (it’s one of my better written pieces), but I strongly suspect that will be exactly none of you.

Oh, Colin Campbell continues to send me little notes about various of my Martian Vision articles. In addition to correcting several of my incorrect statements, he also tells me he feels I’m wrong to lump Doug Moench in with fifth raters like Scott Lobdell and Howard Mackie because, he says, Doug Moench could do good stuff when he wanted to, like his original run on Master of Kung Fu, or Aztec Ace. My take on this (not that any of the ten people reading this care) is that Doug Moench probably never really wrote all that well, it’s just that when we all first started reading Moench, we were very young and much more easily impressed. I seriously doubt any of the people my age who consider themselves huge fans of the Moench/Gulacy run on Master of Kung Fu or Aztec Ace could actually sit down and read any one issue of that comic now without wondering what horrible thing God had done to the script, plot, and artwork in the intervening years since the last time they actually read them (probably when they were still teenagers or in their early 20s). Moench, like Chris Claremont, is an extraordinarily over-emotional writer who relies on frankly insane levels of melodrama, along with a lot of really pretentious sounding psuedo-philosophy, to make his work seem appealing. When you’re 15, the stuff seems utterly brilliant and profound. Go back and re-read any of it in your late 20s and you’ll seriously wonder exactly what you were tripping on when you thought so.

Similarly, Gulacy’s art is very much something that appeals to adolescents, with its Image-heralding obsession towards veiny figure details and heroic poses with every muscle flexed to the maximum. Gulacy knows little to nothing about panel to panel sequential storytelling, however, and what little he does know comes from the eye-popping, in-your-face pencil & ink histrionics of the Steranko school, which is, again, all arterial details and shiny surfaces and stiff, mannequin-like stances.

So, personally, while I’ll accept that I was wrong when I said Alan Moore had never actually drawn anything (apparently he drew his own stories in his earliest appearances in British comics, which I hadn’t known) I will continue to lump Doug Moench in with perpetual fifth raters like Howard Mackie and Scott Lobdell.

And, Colin? Moore’s issue of Spawn rocked. Gaiman’s was slightly better, but Moore’s issue, for all that it only took him three hours to write, was the most solidly entertaining Spawn story, or for that matter story published by Image at all, that had appeared up to that date. Door Into Summer only took Heinlein ten days to write; it’s still nearly every Heinlein fan’s favorite book by him, and one of mine, as well. ::thhhhpppppttttt::

FAITH BASED INITIATIVES

In an overview feature we find at the end of the Buffy Season 4 DVD set, Joss Whedon himself pretty much admits that Season 4 did not work well as an overall arc. He doesn’t quite come out and say it that way, putting it rather on the shoulders of Buffy fandom in general by stating something like ‘a lot of fans don’t seem to feel the fourth season worked as a coherent whole, but I thought that as far as individual episodes went, we had some of our strongest ones in the fourth season’.

Whedon doesn’t name any of the eps he considers ‘the strongest ones’, but I suspect if he were pushed to the wall and forced to, he’d allow that ‘Hush’ and ‘Pangs’ and ‘Superstar’ and ‘This Year’s Girl’ and ‘Who Are You?’ were all exemplary BUFFY shows. He might thrown in ‘Something Blue’ and ‘A New Man’ if his hand were really held over a fire, and he’d almost certainly include the Season Finale, ‘Restless’, which he wrote and directed himself.

The difficulty with all that is that while those episodes are all, arguably, strong individual episodes of Buffy (I think about half of them have some serious problems, which I’ll probably get to later), none of them have much to do with the arc of the season itself, either thematically or in terms of overall story elements. None of the eps I’ve singled out above (I grant you, I’m only guessing that those are the ones Whedon would also single out, but I suspect most Buffy fans, at least, would point to those episodes as being the most memorable and enjoyable of Season 4, if asked) have anything to do with the Initiative or Adam, who turns out to be the major villain/monster of the series, and none of them have anything to do with the major theme of the season, which is, apparently, what happens when modern technology clashes with the occult magic of Buffy’s world.

Of course, there seems to be some dispute over what the major theme of the season is. Some writers and directors on individual comment tracks talk about the idea I’ve denoted above. Whedon himself, however, insists that the ‘theme’ of the season was simply your first year at college, and how people pursue different interests and how old friendships can suffer because of that.

Obviously, both themes were present in the series, and both are, in my opinion, ultimately misguided. The tech vs magic theme is such a seductive one that I doubt I myself could have resisted doing it, had I been in charge of Buffy and had someone pitch it to me… but, ultimately, it built into one of the lamest ideas we’ve ever seen in Buffy (the Initiative, a government sponsored secret military group that hunts demons and conducts experiments on them to find ways to render them harmless or make them more useful) and one of the lamest season villains (Adam, who is little more than Frankenstein’s monster with a slightly more interesting appearance). And, along the way, it gifted us with the horrible blot that was Riley Finn (I can’t bring myself to call Riley a ‘character’; there are veteran extras on Buffy who have never had a line of dialogue who have, nonetheless, given more nuanced and three dimensional characterizations over the years than Marc Blucas ever managed in a season and a half of generally quite painful Buffy appearances)… although I’m willing to admit, my intense dislike for the Riley Finn plot & characterization device may be subjective; I know there are many fans who find him entirely cool.

Beyond being done quite badly, the whole tech vs. magic idea simply strikes me as, ultimately, a completely wrong direction. While the concept of a secret government military operation to protect humanity from demons is fascinating and seems rich with story potential, there were really only two possible results: first, it could make The Slayer look ridiculously ineffective by comparison, or second, it could fail miserably, thus validating The Slayer as the only real defense humanity has against the depredations of inimical occult forces.

Obviously, the show chose to go in the latter direction, with the Initiative ultimately proving spectacularly ineffectual against the dark forces it had naively attempted to dominate and control. And Buffy’s final speech to the commander of the Initiative, in which she pointed out that she was the Slayer, and they had no idea what they were going up against or dealing with and in fact, were way over their heads, was certainly thrilling and nerve-tingling and satisfying to we Buffy fans on a very visceral level.

On a more analytical note, however, it must be admitted that if Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, is indeed the only protection all of humanity has against the forces of supernatural evil, then most of humanity is in a lot of trouble, because in 145 episodes of Buffy, the Slayer left Sunnydale to fight evil exactly once (that I can recall; the opening of the third season was set in L.A., before Buffy returned to Sunnydale for the second ep). Presumably there are vampires and demons preying on humans all over the world; without secret government military forces to help assuage those attacks, I presume such victims who live outside Sunnydale simply suffer and die.

This is one of the essential absurdities of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; there there would be only ONE champion for humanity against the supernatural, and if there is only one, that she would be allowed to remain in one small town for seven years, ignoring the vast majority of the world and its population, is simply ridiculous. The entire Initiative plotline focused attention on this particular fundamental stupidity of the Buffy concept, and for that reason if no other (and there are many others) should have been avoided.

As to the second theme of the fourth season, examining the manner in which the bonds of friendship between Buffy, Willow, Xander, Oz, and Giles were strained and frayed as they all moved beyond their common high school experiences… again, this seems tempting and logical, but I think it was a flawed idea and one that probably should have been, if not entirely avoided, then, at the very least, not the focus of an entire season. Sure, if you want to explore Xander’s feelings of inadequacy based on the fact that he alone of all his friends did not go on to college, fine, devote an episode to it. You want to show that Buffy and Willow are moving in different directions for a while, that’s fine, too. Giles being at loose ends and unable to find anything to do with himself after he loses his job as school librarian (because the school got blown up) is an interesting concept to explore, too. However, each of these things has their own drawbacks and, if drawn out, have enormous potential for alienating the viewers… which, regardless of what some particular performance artists may believe, is never really a good idea.

If Xander feels inadequate, that’s fine. As I say, do an episode around it. Hell, do two or three. But spending an entire season of Xander as little more than a walking joke, Xander with a new humorously humiliating dead end job every couple of eps, Xander, the guy who gets the funny syphilis… given that Xander is pretty much the touchstone for all the male geeks in the Buffy audience, spending an entire season with Xander as ineffectual boob and perpetual comic relief, in which Xander gets to do not one single cool thing until the 21st episode (and then all he gets to do is make a useful suggestion and fire a tasesr-blaster once) is simply pushing half of your audience to the breaking point for no particularly good reason at all except that, well, the writers simply wanted to spend a year having Xander be an idiot.

Xander as Monkey Boy for the season might have been just barely tolerable had we gotten any smilies from the other characters. But early in the season, Willow’s deeply satisfying romantic relationship with Oz was broken up (admittedly, Seth Green’s leaving the show wasn’t in Whedon’s power to control, but what he did with Willow afterwards certainly was) and after several episodes that were nearly unbearable of Willow suffering and moping and miserable, some devilish little light bulb went off over Whedon and Crew’s collective head, and suddenly, as Faith later put it, Willow wasn’t driving stick any more. Having read a sampling of some of the BUFFY chatboards in existence at the time, I know Willow’s sexual explorations gave the bi-sexual and lesbian sub-community among BUFFY fans a deep sense of empowerment, and that’s very nice for them, but the notion that someone as well established as enjoying passion and intimacy with males as Willow was, could suddenly simply reject my entire gender because she met, you know, a stuttering chunky chick with great big cow eyes, was not one that exactly made me feel better about the world I lived in. As with Xander’s unending adventures in boobdom, Willow’s sudden conversion to the exclusively sapphic left me, and I think many other fans, feeling alienated and annoyed by a show that previously had seemed welcoming and inclusive.

If this seems homophobic, well, I don’t think that’s where I’m coming from. Willow being bisexual is something I have no real problem with; in fact, it strikes me as nicely open minded and, in a nearly entirely WASPy world in which apparently no racial or ethnic minorities need apply to help battle evil, having one of the main protagonists expand her social/sexual horizons is more than welcome. And I don’t even mind if Willow is attracted to a female lover I myself simply don’t particularly find all that good looking; I don’t much want to jump Seth Green, either, and I’ll admit that while Amber Benson may not do it for me physically, she’s a very talented actress and Tara was a charming character.

However, Willow did not become more open minded when she embraced Tara, she simply exchanged one exclusive sexual preference for another. Lesbian geeks all over the free world may have huzzahed at this development, but those of us guys who had had crushes on Willow for years certainly felt rather put out by it, and those of us who care about consistent, realistic characterization were exceedingly offended by it. Human sexuality doesn’t work this way. Willow had clearly had profound sexual feelings prior to this for two different men, Xander and Oz, and she is just as clearly not gay, but bisexual. For Whedon to insist… as he does on every comment track he dictates in this set, and in many of his interviews… that Willow is now gay, not bisexual, is simply intolerably aggravating.

Equally baffling and frustrating were Buffy’s continual emotional and romantic flounderings. The season’s initial sexual misadventure with the detestable Parker was, at least, over quickly and resolved satisfactorily, with Parker not only being thrashed by a magically devolved, club wielding Buffy, but also, an episode or so later, by an irate Riley. Yet this, as it would turn out, was the high point for both Riley and Buffy’s romantic life for the entire season, since once Buffy and Riley got over their initial fumbling stage and moved into a more assured and committed romantic relationship, everything that possibly could go wrong absolutely did. From the beginning, there was absolutely no chemistry between Buffy and Riley; Marc Blucas, in fact, demonstrated more chemistry in a small scene between him and Alyson Hannigan then he ever did in several episodes of making out and bunny-humping with Buffy. Riley also went from a charmingly complex fellow who in his debut appearance actually discussed psychological theory quite articulately with Willow, to being nothing more than a dim witted gun-humping soldier-jock pretty much the instant Whedon showed us that Riley was an officer in the Initiative.

(As an aside: this is one of Whedon’s real failings as a writer. In general, he does not seem to be able to write intellectual warriors. Whedon’s characters are either intelligent and erudite, and for the most part, completely useless in battle, or they are skilled and competent fighters who can barely read and certainly couldn’t write a complete sentence. Occasionally we see flashes where this isn’t completely true; Giles, for example, has very rarely been shown to be quite a competent fighter when he’s pissed off enough to put down his books and pick up a chainsaw or a five gallon can of kerosene and a lighter. And, much more recently, Wesley, on Angel, has become quite a three dimensional and well rounded character, in that he has been shown to be an enormously competent fighter and tactical planner as well as a remarkably skilled occult scholar and researcher. But, again, these are rare instances, and Riley very much bears out the far more typical formula… he’s an intelligent and erudite fellow as long as we don’t know he’s also an effective warrior, but the second he’s established as a fighter type, his effective IQ drops 40 points and he apparently loses all his literacy skills as well.)

There’s a commentary track (on “Superstar”, one of the most egregiously annoying eps in the entire 4th Season) in which Jane Espenson mentionss that a certain sequence between Riley and Buffy effectively refutes all those fans (like me) who feel Riley and Buffy should never have been a couple because he simply was never right for her. Espenson is no doubt a lovely human being and a very talented writer, but every time I listen to one of her commentary tracks I want to break something, and this one was no exception. There was never any reason whatsoever for Buffy and Riley to be interested in each other, besides the most shallow physical attraction, since both of them are admittedly very good looking specimens of distaff humanity. Riley and Buffy seem to fall in love because the script says they have to; Riley never manages to articulate any one single thing that draws him to Buffy (“she’s peculiar” is the best he can come up with) and if Buffy ever mentions anything she likes about Riley, I must have missed it.

At one point, Buffy tells Willow that she really wants to be attracted to Riley, because he’s good looking and nice and funny – and he’s not at ALL funny, but never mind that – and he seems very normal compared to her previous, disastrous, relationship with Angel… but the whole point of that conversation is that Buffy isn’t attracted to Riley on a romantic level, she simply wishes she was because he seems much ‘safer’ and more ‘normal’ than the guys she generally goes for. When Buffy and Riley finally become established as being deeply, passionately in love, it struck me at the time, and strikes me more forcefully now, as one of the most unconvincing fictional romances I’ve ever seen. Buffy has more chemistry with Spike in the second and third season than she has with Riley in the fourth and fifth. They simply should not have been a couple, and watching a talented actress like Sarah Michelle Gellar strive desperately to make a completely misconceived relationship work on screen is horribly painful.

Giles being at loose ends is interesting and briefly amusing, but first, anyone who wants to see the generally competent and intelligent Giles as a pointless wastrel probably wasn’t watching the show, they were just making fun of the people they knew who did. More importantly, this points out yet another absurdity of this show that Whedon should really be at pains to try to keep people from noticing: where the hell do certain characters get their money from?

Most of us in the real world… all of us adults, I daresay… know the poignant pain of writing a monthly rent check and watching our bank accounts take a gaping chest wound on a regular basis when our landlords cash it. Many of us whose incomes are not entirely reliable also understand what it’s like to actively wonder, when writing out any one such check, exactly how it is we’re going to manage to write the next one. And I, personally, have never in my life lived in an apartment as nice as the one Giles has, which I have to assume, even in a large town/small city like Sunnydale, has to run something around a thousand dollars a month.

We never see Giles shopping for clothes or groceries but certainly he doesn’t seem to get his clothes at factory outlets or his food at dollar stores, and in the fifth season, when he decides to buy the Magic Shop, he apparently has no trouble doing the deal. (Those in the audience who have tried to put together small business loans of their own, out here in the real world, doubtless found that completely maddening, as well.)

So, when Giles spends an entire season without any visible means of support, and the writers keep pointing out that he’s a godawful slacker without any visible means of support, we really can’t help but wonder, where the hell does he get his money from?

This is the sort of hopelessly realistic question that Joss Whedon would doubtless simply sneer at and say ‘it’s a fantasy show, dickhead, don’t worry about it’, but that’s exactly the kind of answer that makes me think that Whedon should, at best, be a senior scriptwriter on a show that is run by a continuity obsessive (like me) with a fist of iron. Whedon’s good at plotting, dialogue, and characterization, but anyone who creates a fictional reality and willingly refuses to deal with the mundane nuts and bolts of it shouldn’t be allowed to write anything without close supervision.

Overall, then, I have to number myself among the fans who felt that the fourth season didn’t work well or consistently as an overall story arc. Both intertwined themes… magic vs. technology (with its overtones of government/bureaucracy/authority vs. /individuals/anarchy/free thinking) and how friendships are tested and strained when people move in opposite directions… were bad ideas that were badly executed.

Now, there were some strong shows in the fourth season, and those shows make me pleased to have the season on DVD. Unlike the second or third seasons, which I can watch pretty much any single ep of at random and enjoy, though (except for the horrible one where Joyce dates the humanoid robot), much of the fourth season is troublesome and annoying, and nearly any of the eps devoted exclusively to advancing the Initiative plotline I really don’t much want to bother watching again. And even some of the strong individual eps have serious problems.

“Superstar”, for example, while a cute and extremely funny idea, is one that, were I the iron fisted continuity overseer of the show, I would have reluctantly overruled… or, at least, I would have insisted on some plausible reason being put into the episode that explained how a powerless nerd like Jonathan could get access to, and successfully cast, such an overwhelmingly godlike spell. Magic in Buffy’s world had, prior to “Superstar”, been a mostly pretty well defined and contained phenomenon. With “Superstar”, however, we suddenly found ourselves faced with a magic system in which, apparently, anyone who found a scroll could chant a few phrases and completely re-order reality to suit themselves. It was a fun idea, but absolutely ridiculous within any greater, more plausible reality-context, and while the writers on Buffy clearly feel that ‘fun idea’ should always outweigh questions of credibility, this is far too similar to the chant of the ‘It’s Only A Freakin’ Story, Fanboy, Lighten Up’ posse for me to be happy with it.

And this is just much MUCH too long for anyone to read and comment on, so I’ll close by saying I really did enjoy this season’s Halloween episode (“Create a door? You can do that?” Anya asks Giles, the ex-demon preparing to be impressed by some display of previously unknown sorcerous power. “I can,” Giles replies dryly, taking a chainsaw out of his carryall…), and I also very much liked the two parter with Faith (which led into an even better two part Faith story in Angel’s first season) and I really wanted to like the Thanksgiving episode, but (note to horror writers) Native American monsters/threats/supernatural creatures/ghosts just aren’t scary, so quit it, already.

I’ll also spare you my ranting about how Spike is a good villain but a lousy Scoobie Gang member, and his being a lousy Scoobie Gang member all begins here, in the fourth season. Just take it as read.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.